Did I ever tell you that my house is only 65 miles as the crow flies from the Mexican border? That places me right smack in the middle of the Sonoran Desert in the Tucson area. My proximity to Mexico doesn’t present any problem, living in the city as I do, nor should it under any normal circumstances. However, these are not normal times. Move outside of the city any distance into remote areas of the desert, of which there are many, and you enter a different world.

I can now count 40 years in which I’ve been climbing in that desert, and I’ve got to say that there have been some noticeable changes there in that time. As the years passed, there have been more signs of interlopers in the area, people who shouldn’t be there in the first place. This usually takes the form of people smuggling drugs into the country, or undocumented immigrants heading north to the Promised Land, with or without a guide.

Who’s behind all of this activity? Mexican drug cartels, that’s who. Arizona has a 372-mile-long boundary with Mexico, 354 miles of it with the state of Sonora and another 18 miles up the Colorado River with the state of Baja California Norte. You don’t have to travel very far outside the border cities before you find yourself in wide open spaces, places where no people live. Trump’s border wall spans 226 miles of Arizona’s border with Mexico. It stops vehicular traffic, but humans can and do still climb over it or cut holes in it to pass through. Back in the bad old days, much of Arizona’s border with Mexico was marked by a few strands of barbed wire and little else. Simple wire gates like this one allowed anyone to drive right on through.

At one point, the Powers-That-Be decided to discourage vehicles from driving across by installing barriers like this.

Later on, even more daunting fences were built, like this one.

Trump’s border wall took it one step further. I won’t sully my website with a photo of it but you can Google it if you want to see what it looks like.

So, what I’m getting at is the fact that Bad Guys still can and do cross the border, regardless of what obstacles may be put in place to deter them. Once they cross the border, how far they get may depend on their means of travel. Are they on foot? Riding a bicycle? A motorcycle? A quad? A car? A pickup truck?

Drug cartels operate along Arizona’s border with Mexico. Nowadays (early 2025), there are 2 main ones vying for control of that territory: the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG (Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación). These 2 groups hate each other and kill each other’s members whenever they can. They want to control the flow of drugs into the USA. In addition, they want to control the flow of undocumented immigrants into the country, which they can do in different ways: they can guide groups across the border and farther into the country for a fee of thousands of dollars per head; they can charge individuals a fee if they want to try the crossing on their own. Not much crosses the border without their knowledge or control.

They don’t just operate along the border – they have penetrated many miles north into Arizona itself, and in some of the remotest desert areas, they seem to operate with impunity. How do we know they’re here? Well, there are plenty of signs to be seen, and they’re not hard to find. As climbers, we travel on foot through these remote places and see it all. I’m going to share with you some of what I’ve seen with photos I’ve personally taken over the years – these will illustrate what we’re dealing with here.

Without even going to the mountaintops, we can find plenty of abandoned vehicles littering the landscape. So many, in fact, that there was a time when the authorities on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation estimated that 3,000 of them desecrated their land. Virtually all of these were stolen in the US, taken to Mexico, then driven north in the commission of cross-border crimes. They might be parked along a road where they had broken down.

Many were abandoned in more out-of-the-way places.

Lots of them had crashed while fleeing law enforcement, like this Chevy pickup.

Some had met with a violent end, like this one – full of bullet holes and burnt out.

Not all of those vehicles were down close to the border – some had made it a hundred road miles into the US before some poor bastard crashed it while being pursued by the Border Patrol or the O’odham Police. Not all of them were as new as the ones I’ve just shown you – some were much older, like this beauty from 1961.

For some reason, indocumentados seem to think that they can ride a bicycle from the Mexican border north to the Promised Land. The desert is a very unforgiving land when it comes to bikes, as there are endless sharp things that want to puncture your tires. The rough terrain will break a frame soon enough. All in all, it’s a truly cockamamie idea to use a bike to cross the desert, especially the crappy ones that are used in such a venture. I’ve found plenty of them abandoned by their owners, who then had to continue on foot. Here are a few. This one made it all the way to the southern edge of the bombing range.

Here’s another – this guy wasn’t so lucky, only making it 10 miles from the border before crapping out.

Here’s one that made it to within a few miles of the Interstate, almost completing its task. It’s fun to Google these – you can actually see when they were made and how much they cost new.

More fun than finding individual bikes like those above was finding groups of them. You know when you see a sight like these that the Border Patrol has apprehended these folks, arrested them and left the bikes where they were. For example, these were in the northern part of the Ajo Mountains.

Then there was this group of 11, nicely stacked west of the White Hills. This group would have been an easy target for the Border Patrol to spot and apprehend.

Once near the village of Ventana, a group of 7 male indocumentados rode bicycles past me as I was parked alongside a dirt road. I was shocked to see them there in broad daylight – they had already traveled 80 miles to get that far. The Border Patrol arrested them 20 miles later on the Pipeline Road.

On a climbing trip to the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, climber friend Dave Jurasevich and I witnessed a couple of interesting events. As we sat atop the high point of the Gu Vo Hills, we could see steeply down to the highway below. A van pulled over, heading north, and a group scurried out from the nearby vegetation, piled into the van, and sped off. Another time, we were driving past the Border Patrol station at Why, Arizona when we saw a group of indocumentados hiding in a roadside ditch only a hundred yards from the station. What were they thinking? Do you want to get caught that badly? It defied all logic.

Many times I came across places where cartel lookouts had settled in for the long haul. These places, mostly high on mountains, were usually equipped for lengthy stays. Others appeared abandoned.

Seeing a lookout perch was one thing, but actually seeing cartel people in the flesh was always disconcerting. You never knew if they’d hassle or threaten you. I’ve seen lone individuals on foot in many places. To name a few: in the Growler Valley on the east side of the Granite Mountains; near Bitter Well; east of Peak 4158 in the Ajo Mountains; with climber friend Jake Cramer at our camp in the north end of the Sand Tank Mountains. Other climbers have come face to face with cartel lookouts. For example, atop Peak 2284 in the Puerto Blanco Mountains; atop Charley Benchmark in the Growler Mountains, and plenty of others.

It’s one thing to run into a lone individual, but an entirely different matter to run into a group. Some of my scariest moments were times like that. For example, 2 lookouts atop Peak 2870 in the Growlers. They were dressed in camouflage – when I surprised them, they dropped down the 1,500-foot western escarpment and kept going. Another time was when I topped out on Peak 2539 and surprised a group of cartel members who were well-dug-in. They saw me coming, panicked, and took off running down the steep southwest slope of the peak – they dropped 800 feet in mere minutes – I never saw anyone move so fast. Down below, they hit The Great Plain and kept on going like a bat out of hell, heading for the Mexican border 7 miles distant. But the scariest time of all was when I walked right into a group of 4 cartel thugs and their large loads of drugs in the northern part of the Growler Mountains. Another time, Andy and I had just done the first ascent of Tom Thumb and were on our way out when we ran into a pickup truck overloaded with Hispanic men. It was a scary moment – there were so many of them they could have easily overpowered us and taken our 4WD truck.

One time I was sleeping overnight in my truck near Chico Shunie. The back of the truck was open for fresh air, when something woke me up – it was the sound of a large group of individuals walking right past my truck, their shoes crunching on the gravel. The night was as black as the inside of a pocket so I couldn’t see them. They never spoke, as they didn’t want to take a chance of waking me in case I was law enforcement. The next day, I found their footprints in a sandy wash nearby – there must have been 15 to 20 of them in the group in the night.

Many times I’ve stumbled on places where indocumentados have camped, and some of those are regular stopping places. Each of these photos shows a different place.

This next one was taken in the northwest part of the Sauceda Mountains. There were literally hundreds of items here, layers deep, the biggest pile I’ve ever seen. This may have been a staging ground for further travel north, or the Border Patrol had arrested many groups here.

I have found many strange things in the desert. Here’s an example – climber friend Paul is holding a gas can. These were stashed at intervals along remote roads so the cartel thugs could refuel their quads.

On the shoulder of Indian Butte, Jake and I discovered this large pile of cast-off gear.

This was a common burner phone that indocumentados used to contact their pick-up person as they got close to Interstate 8.

Frequently I would come across burlap bags and cardboard used to wrap large bundles of drugs being carried into the US. When these wore out, they would re-wrap them.

The cheap footwear those cartel guys used wouldn’t last long in the rugged desert canyons.

One time when I was climbing up a steep canyon west of Diaz Spire, I heard voices. It was cartel guys speaking Spanish, their voices echoing off the cliffs and reaching me below. I never did spot them, but had their position pinpointed. It was scary, to have to climb up past them in broad daylight to reach my summit. I went into my best stealth mode and avoided detection. They didn’t want me to see them just as much as I didn’t want to be spotted by them.

On 2 separate occasions, cartel thugs broke into my truck while it was parked and I was out climbing. Finally, I wouldn’t even lock it. Nothing of value inside, all my important gear was hidden nearby where they’d never find it. I’d disable the truck so it couldn’t be started and driven.

There were times when I inadvertently drove right into situations where Border Patrol was actively pursuing or arresting Bad Guys. Once, when they were loading them into the back of their trucks; once, when they had just finished busting a group of 20 indocumentados and their load of 2,000 pounds of marijuana. There were also times when they had Bad Guys locked up in the back of their trucks and were taking them in to the BP station to process them, then return them to Mexico.

More than once, I ran across repeaters for 2-way radio communication hidden on mountaintops. These were always reported to Border Patrol who would fly in by chopper and destroy them.

I found locations on mountaintops where cartel thugs had destroyed benchmarks. Why? These only mattered when it came to surveys, and were considered sacred by peakbaggers like myself. Here’s all that was to be found at the site of Henry BM in the eastern Agua Caliente Mountains.

As a result of this illegal cross-border activity, thousands of miles of dirt tracks have been created all across the desert. These have destroyed native vegetation and wreaked havoc on the fragile ecosystem. Many of these scars will be present for hundreds of years.

Who knows how and when this illegal activity will be stopped? It is sad to see the human toll, let alone the economic one, but by writing this piece I wanted to show you that it is very real.